On June 2 there will be an international demonstration against the G8 in Rostock. At the same time, 70 kilometers to the west in Schwerin, fascists will have their own anti-G8 demonstration, to denounce globalization with slogans like “social instead of global”. This shows that fascism is not just a phenomenon of the past – at the moment, the Nazis in Germany are getting stronger again.

It’s been 62 years since the last fascist state on “German soil” was toppled. But this was no “final victory” over fascism. On the contrary, the bourgeois state simply changed its personel, always ready – if the necessity of maintaining the ruling order should demand it – to become a fascist state once again. Because fascism is no product of coincidence, but a direct result of the capitalist means of production.

The constant competition, the constant struggle for ever higher profits leads to capital being concentrated in ever fewer hands. This means the petty bourgeoisie (the so-called small businessmen and middle classes) are pulverized, bit by bit, between the capitalists and the workers. Always hopeful to ascend into the bourgeoisie, always afraid of falling into the proletariat, this section of the population can be won for a mass movement against the workers’ movement: fascism.

At the last federal elections in Germany (2005), the extreme right had just over one million voters. One million people who identify with racism, a “Führer” state and nationalism. This was dismissed in the media as a “protest vote”, but in reality it was an expression of capitalist contradictions. It wasn’t just middle class people who gave their vote to the fascists, but also people from the broad mass of the population. Many of these people came from the lowest social strata. All those, especially in the East of Germany, who capitalism has left without hope, where they are used as an industrial reserve to increase the pressure of the workers; who are used as an argument for reduced social services and lowered pensions.

Fascism offers these people a seeming answer to their problems. It used to be “Jewish world capital” that was a scapegoat for fascist leaders, but nowadays the extreme right attempts a pseudo criticism of capitalism. For example, on May Day this year 1,000 fascists marched through the city of Dortmund under the motto “Together against capitalism”. They raged against “American capitalism’s swarms of locusts”, against “globalization” and against “alienation”, always with the appearance of an anticapitalist perspective. But behind the credo “German people’s economy instead of capitalism” is the insane idea of a homogenous “national community”, the idea of “evil foreign capital” and “good German capital”.

All this is in the interest of the possessing class, because the motto “national community instead of class struggle” is meant to hide the injustice of capitalism, not to abolish it. Therefore it is always in the interest of the capitalists that a fascist movement exists. As soon as a serious capitalist crisis emerges, they will push this movement, buy off the leaders and use it to smash the left.

For this reason we must oppose fascism offensively, take away the possibility that they spread their racist filth amongst the population with rallies demonstrations. We must fight for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism so that one day we will have defeated fascism forever.

by Sceles from Wolfsburg, www.revolution-wolfsburg.de.vu